Tips For Professional & Search Engine Optimized Website
 by: Zaineb Bearingwala

Online presence has become an integral part of more and more businesses today in order to either partially or fully sell their products and services. Just making a presence online is not sufficient, it should be able to catch the eyes of its prospects and to do so it is crucial that the website should be search engine and user friendly. It should be properly coded and designed to give the site an optimized and professional look, so search engines can locate and categorize it in search engine listings. The following are the steps for building complete professional & search engine optimized website:

1. Graphic & Layout Designing
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O)
3. Domain Name
4. Website Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines
6. Search Engine Marketing
7. Web site Promotion

A detailed understanding of the above steps can be seen below.

1. Graphic & Layout Designing:

First impressions are the best impressions and hence the first impression of the site can be got from its graphic and layout designing, further down they are judged by content. The designing should be simple and lucid. All the pages need to be consistent in background, color usage, text format and screen layout.

Background and Text Colors-

The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique and attractive. Choose carefully a set of colors for background & text. While choosing, remember to use dark against light. In other words, use light text against a dark background or dark text against a light background. Don't make the mistake of using a background pattern that has both dark and light colors, it is difficult to choose a text color that is readable against such a background. Background image or texture chosen should contrast well with the text color, so that it is easy to read on screen.

Fonts-

One of the most important parts of a web page is text. It can make your page look very professional or very unprofessional. Always be consistent In other words, avoid using different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana as are easiest for computer screen and for headlines use is Georgia, as it displays slightly in larger fonts.

Formatting Page-

Lay out the page with tables, and set the width in percentage terms (100% to window size) instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way the content of the page will be flexible with changes in browser window size, without the need to scroll horizontally. Links should be well organized, easy to detect by using appropriate colors. Underline your links & use a different color for visited links, put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Provide text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.).

Page Contents-

The content of professional website should be in bulleted or numbered list with direct to the point in short paragraphs, as long blocks of text passages can be boring for reader. It should give clear intention of the web pages. Load the top of the individual pages with most important and essential content with a brief header. Create a simple logo with captivating tag line on the top of the page as a identity of the website. Use common names for menu options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, and Products. Make a copyright statement at the bottom of the each web page

File Size-

Web page size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including JavaScript, flash etc.) within the page download from the server. So, try to keep the size of a web page small by keeping less use of bulky contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc, which slow down the display of the page. If the page has too many items to load and slows to display, break it into smaller pages and link them to a new web page, with link back from the second page.

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